Message from Timothy about swarms

Timothy wrote this post on FB today. I found it important enough to copy it into the blog for future reference of course.The thing about the trees is interesting. I notice that Tits and other birds also choose cavities in trees to build nests in. OMG so many thing to take into account when managing the garden. Yesterday I preformed a cutout. A cutout is when a established beehive is cut from some existing structure in this case from a flat roof. Beehives will move into any suitable space which a roof of a house represents. Normaly in nature swarms/beehives would move into cavity's in trees and caves. With our modern lives these cavity's are rare and most large trees are felled and certainly the rotten one which are hollow tend to be tidied up. This leaves manmade cavity's for the bees to choose from. This invariably means that the hive becomes a pest. In this case their entrance is directly above a doorway and presents a safety risk. So how does a cut out work. First you have to get access to the combs of the hive. From there I catch the bees using a bee vac which is esentaly a vacume cleaner slightly modified to not harm the bees unduly. As I remove the bees I cut the combs and separate brood(baby's) from honey(sticky mess) from wax. I am constantly on the look out for the queen and when I find her I catch her to unite later with her bees and her young. When all the wax/combs are removed and most of the bees caught I place a few combs back into the cavity to catch the last of the bees. I then come back in the late evening to catch these bees which stay on the comb rather than run into the wall or elsewhere. In the mean time I bring the baby bees/brood to one of my apairys and begin placing this brood in combs in a standard beehive using string wires and rubberbands. Then I unite the bees in the beevac with the brood. The last bees which are caught that evening are united later that evening. If I find the queen I cage her for her safety and will release her in a few days. Its a horrible job. It tends to cause damage to the property in this case minimal but in other cases quite a lot. This is the main reason beekeepers manage their bees against swarming. It is near to impossible to preform a cutout without killing quite a lot of the bees in the process as well which is disheartening for most beekeepers and certainly is for me. Hope this was of some interest. And sorry for the length of it but telling a small part of the story doesn't really do justice to the procedure.

Clew Bay Honey’s First Birthday

Message from Timothy Stevens beekeeper to among many others the Polranny Pirates. ‘Hi everyone. Sorry for such infrequent posts. Things tend to get a bit hectic in the summer with me. So here is a quick update no photos I’m afraid as I scratched the lens on the camera I use. I hope to get that sorted out soon and start getting more pics up. I celebrated my 1st year in business on the 20th of June. The year has truly flown for me. To think last year I was registering for tax and getting my company name sorted. The list of what has been achieved from then to now is massive. I started this with 19 hives and now have over 35 full hives and close to 40 nucs(half hives). I am well on line with meeting and surpassing my own goals for this year for growth. All I need now is 3 good weeks weather in July (a big ask I know) and I will be able to get honey into a few more shops.’ Congratulations to Timothy and hopefully the Polranny Pirate Bees will surpass themselves in supplying Clew Bay Honey! I’m going to Amsterdam now and I’ll be away for a few months. Most likely it will be very quiet on the blog for a while. The bees will be busy making honey and I shall miss all the fun.

Ballycroy National Park

Yesterday I took Maureen and Monika, two friends from the OWLs who are staying in the Folly, for a visit to Ballycroy, the Ballycroy National Park and Visitors Center. There I asked the staff if they were thinking about getting bees. No, but they will have a talk the first half of August by a beekeeper from Westport. When we came back I saw that Timothy the beekeeper had put another storey on one of the hives. A sign that things are going well with the Polranny Pirate Bees! I asked Timothy and he answered this: ‘The bees seem to be growing well. They also have adequate stores which is encouraging as this time of the year is usually an issue. I think clover might be a bit early and sycamore which is all but finished certainly was late. The Visitor Centre is a nice spot. It’s probably Henry Horkan who’ll give the talk. Well worth a listen if you are interested he is quite knowledgeable.’

The uses of honey and wax in Ancient Egypt

Honey was the only sweetener the ancient Egyptians had. It was added to wine, various kinds of bread and cakes. Medicines and salves often contained honey. The practice was to apply honey to open wounds—a reasonable treatment considering its antibacterial and fungicidal qualities. Mead is also made of honey. Being universally appreciated jars of the stuff made excellent presents when visiting people abroad. Temples kept hives because Gods had a desire for sweet things too. Honey was found on the table and in the kitchen of the Pharaos and from them it went down the social strata. Even lowly servants dipped the finger in the honey jar. Demands ran so high honey sometimes needed to be imported. Wax was used for sealing things from the seal on documents to the inside of amphora. Wax was also used for plugging up orifices of mummies, as glue and in hair styling, in model making and painting. It was a universally used material, but not as candles. The picture is of the hair and hair extensions on the head of the mummy of Nefertari

Honey and wax harvesting in Ancient Egypt

In contrast to many other customs in Ancient Egypt the harvesting of honey and wax are a bit of a mystery. There is a picture on the wall of a temple about how the hive was evacuated. Smoke was blown into the back of the hive and the bees escaped through the entrance in the front. The rest is conjecture, but in Egypt traditions rarely change and it is pretty safe to suppose that neither has beekeeping. To harvest the honey the combs are gathered in a cow skin. Next the combs are crushed by treading on the skin. Through a hole the honey now flows into a container. What is left in the skin is washed out with a bit of water. Finally the honey passes through a sieve made of blades of grass. What’s left in the skin is the wax. The wax is heated to melting point in a water bath to prevent it from catching fire. Impurities floating on the surface of the liquid wax can be scooped up. Afterwards it is strained and put into a bag press. It has been estimated that for every kilo of honey somewhat more than sixty grams of wax can be won.

Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt

Apiculture was popular in the whole of Egypt but particular in the Delta region. Hives were made of mud or reeds covered with mud. Empty hives were also used as wall insulation of houses. The cylindrical hives were stacked horizontally, sometimes up to 500 together. The harvesting was done twice a year: in spring and autumn. Because of the climate there seem to have been no winter hibernation. The hives were transported to where the flowers were. They had to be moved again when the farmers were clearing the ground by fire after harvest or when the Nile water rose and it was necessary to bring the hives to higher ground. The moving could cause some logistic problems especially when there were many hives involved. It is all written down in queries, prayers and petitions and mercifully kept for prosperity. The drawing is of fields on the banks of the Nile and two huge statues near Luxor

Bellagorick

Once upon a time Ireland went for self-suffiency. That’s how it came about that the first and only electric power-plant running on turf was build on the massive bogs of the North Mayo plane. One could see it from miles around. A village with a post office, a pub, a shop and several houses had been build around the plant. You don’t see them in the drawing because they are in the valley where the river runs through that provided the power station with cooling water. It was a welcome stop in the middle of the nothingness of the immense bog. Was it a venerated landmark or an eyesore? Was is progress or folly? To me it was all of the above. But then Ireland became part of the big global economy and the use of turf as fuel was laughed at: too expensive, too labour intensive. Oil now, that was the thing. The drawing was made during the hot summer of 1983. I remember sitting by the side of the road, sketching at full speed being pestered by horseflies. One day they tore down the power station. A big bang and it crumbled. By then the post office was closed, followed by the shop and the pub. Most of the village stands empty. There is a wind-power park to the north of Bellagorick now because the already existing electric grid is at hand. Why this post on a blog about bees? Timothy’s colleague Jude from the Westport Beekeepers Association gave the excuse. He keeps a lot of hives up that way. Lovely heather honey no doubt.